Month: July 2017

For over 9 years I have been working for florists who want their website to bring in as many orders as possible. I would like to share a few things I have learned.

You Will Always Be Learning & Everything Changes

From the website platform to everything Google, to social media trends and market conditions, everything will change. So what may have worked two years ago or two weeks ago may not be working today.

2. Know your KPIs

What key performance indicators should you be monitoring? Simply, revenue. But to get your revenue up, you may have a goal of higher order values so you have fewer delivery costs. And the road to more revenue is filled with the finer details. How much time do clients spend on your site? Is your site enticing enough to get them to visit longer? Is your merchandising the right mix for your market and your customers? Are your marketing efforts producing orders? There is a lot of data available to you for analyze. Choosing the metrics that matter can take a while to narrow down.

3. Please Your Customer

It really is all about customer perception. Train your staff to always be courteous. Give them the power to resolve issues immediately, whether that be a full refund or replacement. Make sure they are taking the time to understand what the customer is wanting. Engage with them on social media. Share pictures and stories about your shop and team. Offer incentives a few times a year. Send informative emails once or twice a month. Blog about classes or how to design simple arrangements. Share. And this will lead to those lovely reviews that you need.

4. Be Clear and Consistent with Your Brand

If you don’t have a beautifully simple logo, get one now. Put it everywhere in the shop, on your delivery fleet, on your pick cards, on your website and everywhere online that you are allowed to upload it. Make sure you use the exact same shop name, address and phone number – to the character – everywhere. Use the same fonts in your marketing copy and use the same “voice” on Facebook as you do in your shop. If you are formal and businesslike, that’s fine. If you are looser and more playful, that’s fine, too. Just keep it fairly consistent across all channels that are customer-facing.

5. Make Friends with Google

Google has the best set of free digital marketing tools. Period. To track traffic and a phenomenal amount of details about how people find and use your website, start with Google Analytics. To advertise in Google Search, use Google AdWords or AdWords Express. To enhance your AdWords program with remarketing ads, you’ll need to set up a Google Merchant account and data feed. To track mentions of your shop, set up a Google Alert. To see what people are looking for over time, use Google trends. The list goes on. Tip: Before you start, set up a Gmail account for marketing purposes only. This email will be your Google properties login, even if key personnel leave the shop and go elsewhere. Change the password between personnel and keep it in your safe or password vault.

I’d love to take a look at what you are doing and discuss what is working well for you and what areas of improvement we can find. In the past 9 years as an internet marketing consultant for florists, I’ve become pretty familiar with most of the marketing venues our industry employs.

Want to know if your Yelp plan is paying for itself? If your AdWords is getting a good cost-per-acquisition? If customers are staying on your site long enough? Or if your conversion rate is strong?

My 30 Point Digital Marketing and Website Audit should leave you with an actionable strategy that you can start immediately! My fee is $349 for a full hour and a half, plus an hour’s preparation and research on my end – before we meet.

I’m looking forward to talking with you about your efforts to reach your shop’s goals.

Internet marketing is a big ocean, growing larger and larger as search engines change their algorithms, new social media emerge and technology changes. How do you keep your focus on marketing efforts that actually increase profits? By keeping your focus narrow instead of broad. By letting others learn the nitty-gritty of all things web marketing and telling you what will most likely work and what probably won’t.

First, a quick summary of all the tasks you will need to do – or have done – to fully market your e-Commerce website.

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choose a template or custom-design your own

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About Nitty Gritty

In 2008, working at Teleflora as a custom eFlorist website developer, I was given an opportunity to switch my career path to internet marketing for a Top 100 shop. I dived into a challenging, ever-changing field. My goal, conversion optimization. In other words, to leverage all the goodies available to us on the internet to help florists be found in searches, be clicked on, and be given that order.